Chuck McCullagh's views from Manhattan on magazine and publishing technology.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Sochi, the Daily Show, and Media in Retreat

I can’t bear to watch the Sochi Olympics on television. Perhaps because there are thirty inches of
snow outside my office windows while the Olympic site is experiencing beach
weather. Actually, I think is something
deeper.

The Olympic site has been widely branded as another Potemkin
village named for the phony settlements built in the Crimea by a Mr. Potemkin
to impress Empress Catherine II. While
this anecdote is probably apocryphal, it seems to have stood the test of time. Of course, building facades to impress the
other party is as old as, well, sport. London
and Beijing covered a lot of their inner city-rot before their respective
Olympics and gave the homeless and the untidy one-way tickets out of town.

The media has had a field day with reports of snowboarders
locked in Sochi bathrooms, hotel water running yellow and downhill skiers
adjusting to the beach conditions. One
can’t be sure whether it is comic relief or Russian destiny to repeatedly see
President Putin rise out of the sea or some embroidered clam shell to proclaim
with his bare chest and Soviet grin that Russian manhood, long devastated by
alcohol and suicides, is now in good hands. One can hardly blame social media for finding
in this artifice a version of the Most Interesting Man in the World campaign,
Dos Equis-style, perfectly equipped to pull the tail of a snow leopard, toss a
300-pound male with the flip of his judo hips, and, when necessary, part the
Black Sea.

I think it was Karl Marx who said that history repeats
itself first as tragedy, then as farce, apparently referring to Napoleon I and
his nephew Louis Napoleon. But, in these
days of compressed time, we don’t have to wait for the long arc of history to
play itself out. The Sochi political
overlay, the dictator-cum-breasts, and the delicious, brotherly canards offered
up by the Olympic Committee are indeed the stuff of farce. Unfortunately, tragedy lurks just below the
surface. Please don’t look for it on
NBC, our paid sponsor.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has published a
devastating account of media repression and self-censorship related to the
Sochi Olympics. (“Media Suffer Winter Chill in Coverage of the Sochi Olympics”,
available at www.cpj.org). The report describes the exploitation of
migrant workers, forced evictions, environmental destruction, contaminated
water supply, and levelling of prime forests.
But the real guts of the report is the extent to which the Russian
government has muzzled both Russian and international journalists. The CPJ reports government payouts to media,
prior review of programming, and widespread use of paid content. The government threatens to withdraw media
licenses to any outlet that addresses any of the touchy subjects, meaning
anything the government has not approved in advance. Journalists are harassed. Defamation in the press is a criminal offense.
There is hostility to all things
foreign. The approved article lead is
this: “The skies are always clear over Sochi.”

In perfect serendipity, the Daily Show, apparently
dissatisfied with the New Russia fantasy being showcased in Sochi, traveled to
Moscow to find the old Russia. In
looking for the historic bread lines, the reporter found lines for lattés and
the like. He begged Russian politicians
to bring back the Cold War. He even
managed, or perhaps staged, a brief session with Gorbachev, pleading with him
to bring back the Berlin Wall. The
Master of Détente threw him out of his office.

I found the Daily Show piece especially interesting because
I was working in Moscow during the “perestroika and glasnost” period. It became pretty clear early on that the
Communists simply walked across the street and became Western-style Democrats
overnight. Putin is a reminder of how
little has changed.

The Daily Show joke seemed to be that the old enemy was much
more interesting and useful than the new regime in tights. But perhaps the joke runs deeper than that. Add a little gas money, international prestige
and secret handshakes from the guys who hold the Olympic rings, and we have a
modern day Potemkin village, sturdier than the one erected for Catherine II and
expansive enough to feature the new emperor, usually without his shirt, pulling
the world’s chain while laughing all the way to the bank.